


Like the Snow, Like the Dark

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 22:23:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce and Steve's first time, some winter night, Asbury Park.  Bruce listens to Steve, when it's important.  Most of the time</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like the Snow, Like the Dark

Steve's been having wet-dreams about Bruce since he was sixteen. He's pretty sure that's normal, though, the way Bruce is, kind of sliding his way through the world, heavy-lidded, licking his lips and fidgeting with his hands. 

He's also pretty sure Bruce has absolutely no idea what he _does_ to people, walking around like a spaced-out tom-cat and practically married to his guitar. Bruce just _exists,_ barreling through his life with a single mind. Music, that's it. Bruce is gonna be a rockstar. Steve knows it. Bruce knows it, too, mostly doesn't bother to tell anyone, like it ought to be obvious to anyone who looks, like it doesn't matter because it's just plain going to happen. Bruce scares people and seduces people at the same time without even _knowing_ it. 

Steve's dreams are wild and dark and confused and leave him hard-awake and frustrated in the dusky dawn.

Bruce said to him, _we need a bass player._ And the way Bruce looked at him it didn't even matter he didn't play the bass. He'd fucking learn it, ok. 

They live in upstairs at the surfboard factory. Steve splits his time at his parents' place. But the gigs run late and he has that construction job and it's just easier, he tells himself, to stay with Bruce and Danny and Vini, even if it means that most of the time, he sleeps on the floor of Bruce's room. Which he tells himself he likes better because the other options are couch cushions on bathroom tile or hardwood floors. The converted office that Bruce sleeps in has that cheap industrial carpet so it kind of feels a little warmer, a little nicer. Maybe he just tells himself that because Bruce sleeps there, too. Bruce tolerates him better than Danny and Vini, in the sense he _listens_ to Steve about seventy, seventy-five percent of the time when it's important.

So he lays down a cheap roll of futon and a couple of uhaul blankets and winds down listening to Bruce doing the same some five feet away in the blackout curtain dark.

Like a certain kind of music, how the blood moves the lungs moves the ribs moves the mattress and the springs. Like a certain kind of music. Sometimes the scratch of a pen, even in the pitchblack. Intense doesn't even begin to cover it. Wrapped up in his own world. At least he comes out of it to listen to Steve, sometimes. When things are important.

Winter slips down the Atlantic coast sure and swift. They sleep the slow leak of the day away and play the clubs at night and go to bed when the dawn is barely pearling up the horizon. It rains; worse, it _sleets_ , which Steve believes to be the most wretched weather ever invented by god - it's like rain that fights back, spits in your face, and kicks you when you're down.

It's sleet, one night, coming home from a gig. They're all exhausted, and Danny and Vini crash in the bathrooms leaving him and Bruce soaked in that awful skysnot and roadsalt.

Bruce strips right down, which he always does anyway, rubbing himself down with an extra shirt because he left his towels in the bathrooms where Danny and Vini are sleeping because they clearly hate Bruce right now because of the sleet and the fact they didn't get paid but chicken feed for the gig. Or something. Steve has a couple of towels, and he throws one Bruce's way. 

Bruce hasn't got a damn ounce of shame, for all he turns inward sometimes. It's like how he swaggers, how he looks at people all sweet and heavy and determined and they fall for him. So Bruce is stripped down to his underwear with Steve's towel over his shoulders and Steve takes his own clothes off and wraps himself in a uhaul blanket and jesus fuck, why is sleet always colder than _snow_ somehow? 

"Hey, Steve."

"Huh?"

"...ain't it your birthday, or something?"

"Bruce, that was like, two weeks ago." Something like. The intervening days are a blur. He turned nineteen. It was probably important to remember.

"Oh."

"Fuckin' _cold._ " Steve mutters. 

"Come sleep with me," Bruce offers, so quiet, so lilting-innocent, like when he asked him to play in his band, like his heart knew it would happen but his brain was shaky on the details. Steve isn't so stupid he's going to say _no_ , he's freezing his balls off, so he takes his blankets and crawls into the bed which is just-barely big enough for both of them because neither is exactly linebacker material. They've got to sort of huddle together, which is nice, skin warms up real fast like that, to a nice, comfortable snoozing level. Could almost forget the weather, which is still barking down the alley and spitting on the windows.

He's almost sleeping.

"Steve?"

Steve grunts.

"I didn't get you no birthday present."

It's fuck-o-clock in the goddamn morning and he's wrapped up around Bruce who is basically his best friend in the world and it's warm and nice and he just wants Bruce to stop talking. Usually, it takes a fucking act of god, or a performance, to get him up to normal-human-chatting status. Now they're in the dark with hardly a dime of space between them, and Bruce is talking about birthday presents.

This is a little weird, Steve thinks. Even for Bruce, this is a little weird.

"So?"

"Well, that's not right, is it?"

"Bruce, go to sleep."

"No," Bruce says, and suddenly he's turning over, slipping his hand down Steve's back and hooking his thumb in the waistband of his underwear and oh, _christ_ , "No, that ain't right. I got to give you something."

Holy _shit._ He has got to be dreaming. He isn't. The wind is howling. He can see just barely the glitter of Bruce's eyes through the dark. It's warm. It's so warm with him under the covers.

"Please, Steve." Innocent. Bruce doesn't even look at _girls_ , not like the rest of them do. Music is his pretty mistress, yes she is. But Bruce's mouth is soft and shy on his face, seeking his lips, and his hand is still moving on his thigh, so Steve's hand like a mind of its own moves in time, finds a little patch on Bruce's back that if he presses down just so to stroke Bruce makes a sound in his chest like the last vibrations hanging in the air just past the end of a note. There. The breath between.

_Bruce? Forgot to tell you, but I never actually played bass before._

His one hand falling asleep under Bruce's ribs. His other playing in time with Bruce's curious touches. He's hard in an instant, just like he is when he wakes up from frantic dreams of tangled hair and high cheekbones and the lower lip he's always biting when he writes his songs he's so goddamn beautiful really, can you call a man beautiful? He doesn't know but decides firmly there and then he doesn't care.

"Please."

He's still asking. 

Steve can't say no. "Yes," he whispers, shakily, into the passing curve of Bruce's ear, before Bruce's mouth hits his throat and Bruce's hand thrusts awkwardly into his briefs and the fucking _sparks_ he sees when fingers that aren't his own hit his dick. He tries, clumsy, unskilled, unhinged, to return the favor. He bites Bruce's mouth and Bruce moans through his tongue and down into his chest.

At a gig when the house lights fall and the jeering steadies to a hum he'll feel the drums in the floor and the amp in his belly and the bass in that soft spot below his heart. He hears the lyrics most of all, he hears Bruce, the storyteller, the loose, raw, unpolished passion. 

In the bed in the dark in an Atlantic storm Bruce moans appreciation against him, touches him, jacks him off and it feels weird and backwards like his hand but not, even when he manages to get his shaking fingers onto Bruce's cock it's tricky in the black not to just feel like he's touching himself somehow, except for those moans, and the hot mouth on his, and on his neck and shoulder and he comes biting right back, always a little lower, always a little rougher. A diesel truck beside a growling muscle car. Power one way or another. In the bones. The little bones in the throat, what are they called? He learned in biology once. 

Like in biology when they giggled over the textbook cutaways of men and women. Nothing like this. They don't teach this in school. Not even Elvis, not James Brown, not matched sets of ladies in slinky glitter dresses that catch the lights like eyestars. Like Bruce, looking baleful at him in the dark, whispering please.

Oh, please, oh, please, yes. 

"Yeah, fuck, yeah."

"Steve - " The whine bends upward. 

Steve pushes his face into Bruce's throat and comes hard into his hand. It doesn't take much more for Bruce to follow, so close he comes sticky and hot on Steve's bare stomach, mixing, mingling, trembling and clutching each other beneath the blankets. The wind is still up but the thumping smack of sleet on windows seems stilled, but there's still that heft, something buried deep in the spine, like a barometer. Snow, maybe. Gone to snow. Cold and sweet. 

Bruce is hot in his arms, face in his chest, shivering a little. Steve touches his bony back. Down the lean muscles. Slow and lazy. Like the snow. Like the dark. Steve is afraid for one brief moment - surfacing above exhaustion - that Bruce will withdraw now, go into one of his sulks or worse, but sinks slow back into the warmth thinking no, no, of course not. Bruce listens to him. When it's important, Bruce listens to him. So he says it with his mouth and his hands and his arms and his legs, this is important. Listen, Bruce. Listen. 

This is important.


End file.
